What Am I Thinking?

For as long as I can remember I have always been very interested in consciousness or the mortal soul.  From the time that I was told you can die and go to Heaven it really made me think about my body as a vessel more than anything.  It always made me wonder if dying was like falling asleep or if you just woke up surrounded by white and light or who knows maybe God just walks up and says hey.  But either way it has always been tough for me to separate consciousness from the brain.  I can imagine an out of body experience but somehow that is different.  That is obviously stated as an experience where your viewpoint is as if your body is somewhere else.  To me my consciousness is much more of an idea.  There is no physical to is so it is hard to imagine that it could travel in a physical sense. Like I couldn't send my consciousness by Burger King before I went to the after life.

Out-of-Body-Experience

What I'm really trying to get at is how do we separate the physical from the mental?  Our world now is so overbearingly physical that the mental seems to get pushed to the side.  I admit that I think way too much for my own good but I just don't feel like most of us are thinking enough.  Even if we are, maybe we are thinking in the wrong ways.  Being a Christian I do believe in God, Heaven, and an afterlife so it is important to remember that what life I have here on Earth is only a grain of sand compared to the beach of a life I will have afterwards.  So what is important to this afterlife?  What do I need to focus on while I am here in order to not look back and think wow I had it all wrong then?  Or will we always say I had it wrong then no matter what? I feel like there is so much going on between Facebook and Twitter and school and work and friends and movies and family and music and TV and just life that we never get the chance to slow down and just really think.  We are is such a rush all of the time that we forget to be honest with ourselves.  We lose our perspective on life.  It becomes easier and easier to forget that tomorrow is just another day. But if we run with the idea that tomorrow is just another day it also becomes easy to overlook the things that actually may be of value.  So how do we differentiate between short term and long term goals?

There are so many things that we want to achieve in so many categories that it gets tough to sort through it all to decide what gets your attention.  I'm in school right now so everyone thinks that class should be my focus but I can't help but think I will never need to know Spanish again.  But then again I do want to get a good job and to do that I need to graduate so that in turn makes Spanish class important.  This means that now things that aren't important to you can become important because of other things.  This is why goals are so confusing.  But the Bible actually has some clues on how to prioritize.

James 4:13-15

13Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.”

14Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.

15Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.”

The way I understand this is that James is saying to these businessmen that goals aren't bad, in fact they are good.  However, we can only achieve them if God allows us to, or better yet even allows us to live.  So if we make Him our first goal and then move on from there we will be fine.  It sounds really easy, I know.  The part where I still get tripped up is all of my other goals and not moving them ahead of Him.  I have to write down all of my goals and then see which ones are just for me and which ones can advance my relationship with Him.  It's a funny thing thinking about every little thing we do and how it effects our relationship with God.  I think it is beneficial and challenging.  Our perspective on life is constantly changing, the best we can do is to hope that we can keep God a constant throughout, then maybe He will save our souls.